


Winter Soldier

by laniew1



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Female Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-02-08 01:29:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1921572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laniew1/pseuds/laniew1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To agree with being a part of Erskine’s program Bucky asked for one thing, that Stevie be kept safe using one of Howard Stark’s newest inventions to be woken when they could fix the things that would take her away from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry. :( this is what I've been working on instead of the next part of SS:AOS, but I hope to have the next part of that up this weekend. So a little cookie of the fic that will most likely follow it. :D

**Winter Soldier 1/?**

 

 

He agrees to Erskine’s serum because they offer a way for him to save Stevie. He wasn’t going to before; he’d resigned himself to Stevie dying and them allowing himself to be shoved off into the war where he could, eventually, follow after her.

But then Erskine stops them at Stark’s show and says ‘we can save her, but…’

The ‘but’ is the crux of the issue; one of Stark’s experiments is cryo-freezing. Bucky hadn’t heard nothing about that, but Stevie had perked right up. Apparently it was in one of those crazy science fiction booklets she’s been reading, he knew he should have kept a better eye on what sort of stuff that was.

He looks at Stevie all pale skin and breath rattling in her chest and he knows that she’s one bad winter from not clutching at his arm anymore and he says yes, with some ‘but’s’ of his own.

 

******************************************************************************

 

The future would be something that Stevie would love.

But Stevie’s not there, Stevie’s not _anywhere_ because one of the first things he’d asked after he broke out of the 1940’s replica hospital room and ran down the streets in a t-shirt, pants and bare feet, was where the hell Stevie was.

Her tube, that metal thing that Stark had froze her in had gone missing along with all the rest of the tubes that had been lined up in that dark, dank room back in the late 1940’s.

 

******************************************************************************

 

When he’s bored he goes and hangs out in Tony’s lab. It reminds him of the war and sitting with Howard while they talked through ideas for weapons and armor, with Peggy chiming in periodically to tell them that something wasn’t going to work.

Tony Stark is a lot and nothing like his father, he tells Tony this once, after they’re getting along and not wanting to pummel each other into the ground.

“I kind of appreciate that,” Tony says, some smirk that he can’t read on his face.

Bucky shrugs and runs a cloth over his shield again. Tony’s working on something over in the corner; Bucky can’t make hide nor tail of it so he focuses on the shield and his guns. Both things that he does understand.

 

******************************************************************************

 

Natasha tries to set him up on dates but all the girls are busty and sassy and that’s never really been his type.

Though Stevie has been very carefully edited out of his story, so all people see is Peggy and he’s kind of glad that Stevie wasn’t around to see all that.

He’d like to think that she would understand, he thinks she would have liked Peggy, would have found her smart and strong and probably would have been pushing Bucky into her bed long before Bucky actually managed to fall there himself.

He’d regretted it every time, but Stevie had been frozen up waiting for miracle cures to all those things that ailed her and Peggy had been there and he was a man in his 20’s in the middle of war with the girl he wanted sleeping like a fairytale and not writing him letters sealed with perfumed kisses like some of the other guys got.

 

******************************************************************************

 

He tries to date Sharon Carter; she’s Peggy’s niece and has the same look about her. Kind of reminds him of Stevie if he’s being truthful with himself.

“I’d say it’s not you, it’s me,” Sharon says, she has her arms crossed over her chest and looks all kinds of angry. He’s been gone for almost a week on not-quite-Avengers-but-close-enough business so he’s not exactly sure what he did, “but I really, honestly believe it’s you.”

“I told her I’d apologize,” he says to Clint later, they’re both raiding Stark’s kitchen because they’ve both been gone for a week and he’s pretty sure he’s going to have to toss out his refrigerator and just start all over again.

“What are you apologizing for?” Clint asks, he’s got a plate of something that looks like leftover meatloaf in front of him, Bucky’s not sure when they actually had meatloaf though it does smell good.

“I don’t really know, but that’s what you do, right? When your dame gets upset at you?”

His only experience with dames prior had been a line of girls in his bed, Stevie and Peggy. Stevie would have looked just completely disappointed in him and Peggy would have actually shot at him.

Had actually shot at him before so he knows that to be a fact.

“I don’t know if Sharon could really be called your ‘dame’,” Clint says, air quotes and all. Bucky looks at him and hopes his face properly conveys his confusion.

“You never went on dates with her, she’d come here or you’d go to her place and then you guys fucked around for a couple of hours and she’d go home or you’d come home. That sounds more like friends with benefits or fuck buddies. Probably fuck buddies,” Clint says and he shrugs when Bucky looks at him.

“Stevie would be so disappointed in me,” he says finally, because it’s probably true, if there’s one thing the Avengers try not to do its lie to each other.

 

******************************************************************************

 

Of course then they get called in for a meeting and Natasha isn't there because she’d lied to them apparently.

 

******************************************************************************

 

Natasha is chasing after an assassin that was apparently trained by the Red Room.

“I thought the Red Room was shut down?” Tony asks, he’s tapping at his phone and ignoring Fury’s glares.

“Apparently, like all evil organizations they had some undergrown network that continued to operate after the core group was decimated.”

They don’t have a good picture of the woman that Natasha is trying to catch up to; petite, blonde, and absolutely deadly. Fury’s got video of her fighting two men more than twice her size and Bucky’s seen Natasha do some pretty incredible things but this woman is just as good. She takes them down in under 90 seconds.

She’s wearing all black and her blonde hair is tied back in some sort of braid thing that doesn’t allow for it to be grabbed.

“One of the guards has three broken ribs, the other one hasn’t woken up yet.”

“Do we have any sort of ID on her?” Clint asks, he’s still as he watches the tape loop back around again, studying it like he’s searching for weak spots they might be able to target.

“Natasha thinks it might be the Winter Soldier, though the soldier is a myth that circulates through the intelligence community about once every 5 years or so. She also thinks she might actually be an American that the Soviets captured or kidnapped. There’s been about 90 murders attributed to her but no actual verifications, this woman is a ghost,” Fury says, “and we need to put a net around her before the Russians or someone else does.”

“Why doesn’t ‘tasha just kill her?” Clint asks, he cocks his head to the side, eyes narrowing, Bucky doesn’t miss the way his eyes kind of flitter toward him before his facial expressions just kind of shut off.

“Because if the Widow _kills her_ we don’t get any answers as to where she came from, or find out if her body count is as high as it’s reported to be.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

The Soldier is always one step ahead of Natasha, it’s like she has some sixth sense as to when Natasha is going to be coming up strong behind her and feints to the left and takes a right. There’s one time before they manage to snag her that Natasha had feinted and took the same right only to have the Soldier circle back and Natasha ended up with a split lip and snarling anger.

They catch her on a Thursday, Natasha managing to step aside long enough that Clint gets a clear shot with the tranquilizer darts and the Soldier goes down in a crumpled heap.

She’s wearing a half mask of some sort and physically she’s actually smaller then Natasha which Bucky didn’t think was possible.

He closes the door on the Soldier and waits for Fury to give the Avengers their next assignment.

 

******************************************************************************

 

“So the thing is,” Tony starts, Bucky’s flipping through the pictures on the digital camera, there was one that he took that morning that he’d wanted to show Bruce because it might be a nice print for Bruce’s calm room.

Tony doesn’t say anything else so Bucky finally looks up, Bruce already focused on the other man.

“The thing is…”

“You can just spit it out Tony,” Bucky says, “And if this is another birds and bees talk I don’t really need help in that area.”

“No, no,” Tony waves a hand.

“Tony?” Bruce says, his voice nice and calm, Bucky still scoots an inch away and folds the camera close to his body just in case the other guy decides to get pissy and make an appearance.

“We ID’d the Soldier finally,” Tony says, Natasha appears at his shoulder and her hand locks around his arm, Bucky thinks she might be angling to yank him out of the room which means this is probably something he needs to hear but won’t like at all.

“He has a right to know,” Tony snaps.

“Not like this,” Natasha snarls back at him.

“Yes like this, because otherwise Fury’s going to bury it and her and you’re going to let him.”

Natasha flinches like Tony just smacked her.

“We got all the bloodwork and DNA results this morning,” Tony says, he takes a shallow breath and looks right at him, not blinking at all. “They all positively identified the Soldier as Stephanie Rogers.”

 

 

******************************************************************************

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Winter Soldier 2/?**

 

 

Fury looks like the vein in his forehead is going to pop, he’s absolutely infuriated but Bucky doesn’t care. If Tony was right, and Tony is rarely wrong, or doesn’t actually see the need to lie to him, then Stevie’s alive and he _needs to see her_.

“She won’t know you,” Fury says, again.

“I don’t care,” Bucky says, it could probably be construed as snapping.

“Captain Barnes,” Hill starts and he just looks at her, whatever she must see on his face her mouth snaps closed and her eyes narrow.

“I don’t care, I want to see her.”

“She’s sedated right now,” Fury says, the doctor that was sitting in front of Fury’s desk when Bucky came in clears his throat which draws all attention to him. He’s as far from Bucky’s reach as he can be, he probably would have fled the room but Tony is stationed right at the door looking completely gleeful.

“That’s actually…” the doctors voice trembles slightly, “she keeps burning through the sedatives we’re giving her right now, we’ve tried to up the dosages to what we would give Captain Barnes or Doctor Banner and she’s… we’ve done some more bloodwork and…”

“They gave her some form of the serum,” Bucky says, regardless of what everyone thinks he’s not an idiot, he actually did better than Stevie did in school, though not by much.

“Something similar to what they gave Agent Romanoff, though I think by the time they were actively dosing the children within their program they were given a much more conservative version of it. Ms. Rogers is…”

“They couldn’t control her,” Tony offers from the door. “They modified the formula so that they could control anyone _else_ they gave it too, but they’d already dosed her and there’s no take backs in that form of genetic therapy.”

“The little information that Agent Romanoff has been able to supply and Red Room records that we’ve managed to decrypt once we managed to gain access to them, they used a mixture of electro shock therapy and some very questionable brain washing methods and…” the doctor waves a hand.

“It all means she won’t know you,” Fury says.

“That might not actually be the case,” the doctor says, he wilts from the glare that Fury aims in his direction. “She’s got a form of the serum, we’re already seeing a marked difference in the brain scans, when she’s conscious, which is more and more frequently; she’s speaking almost exclusively in English now, though she still lapses into Russian when she gets confused or agitated. She… well she might actually…”

“She might know me,” Bucky says, the doctor nods slowly.

“If she doesn’t now, she might at some indeterminable point in the future. But we can’t even begin to know everything the Red Room did to her, she might not… they might have done enough damage prior to injecting her with the serum that she won’t be able to recover from it.”

Bucky looks at Fury, at Hill who looks like she is commiserating with him, to the doctor who looks down at the ground and doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

“I want to see her,” he says again, this time the tone of his voice brooks no argument.

 

******************************************************************************

 

They compromise, or Fury says this is how it’s going to be and we start this way or we ban you from the building.

Bucky could fight his way into her room but he’s trying to weigh the pros and cons, if he gives Fury this little measure then he can push to get into the room that much quicker once Stevie knows him.

The room is completely barren and they’re keeping her in some one piece unitard thing. Stevie probably hates it.

She’s curled up on the thin bed, arms wrapped around her knees. She looks, if he didn’t know, if he couldn’t see her face he wouldn’t be able to tell this woman was Stevie Rogers.

She looks stronger and healthier, there are visible muscles in her arms and her complexion isn’t the pale, sickly white that he remembers. She’s glowing with health and vitality even as she shakes.

He’s alone in the room save for Tony sitting in a corner attempting to look like he’s not paying any attention at all and Natasha standing at the door with her arms crossed over her chest.

He presses the button that he’d been told would open up the microphones between the room and Stevie flinches in the room, curling in further on herself.

“Stevie,” he says, he keeps his voice soft and light. The doctor had said that she reacted badly to loud sudden noises.

Her head raises and her eyes focus unerringly on the wall that they’re hidden behind. He swears he can feel her staring into his soul; she makes a noise that sounds like dismissal and hides her face in her knees.

“Do you know who I am Stevie? Do you know the sound of my voice?” he asks quietly, he touches the glass that he can see her through but she can’t see him.

She looks stricken for a moment, Bucky’s fairly sure he didn’t imagine that and then she mutters something in Russian that he doesn’t understand. He looks over at Natasha pleadingly and she rolls her eyes at him even as she moves to stand next to him.

“She said ‘trick’,” Stevie’s eyes dart up to the wall again; he’d forgotten to hit the button so he knows she heard Natasha. Her eyes narrow and there’s a calculating expression on her face that Bucky doesn’t know if he’s ever seen.

She stares at them and he can feel Natasha rolling her shoulders like she’s getting ready to go into battle, he waits for her to say something else and isn’t prepared for her to roll over to her other side and proceeding to ignore them.

Bucky sighs and hits the button again. She was always a stubborn little brat.

“Well that was certainly anti-climactic,” Tony mutters, then adds brightly, “but at least she reacted to you, maybe it’ll go better next time.”

 

******************************************************************************

 

It doesn’t go better next time, three days later Bucky tries again and Stevie doesn’t respond to anything.

She sits on the narrow bed, knees drawn up to her chest; arms wrapped around them and stares at the wall.

She never once acknowledges them.

 

******************************************************************************

 

He tries, every single day, he talks to her and talks to her and is almost grateful for Fury deciding that he needs to be doing something more productive with his time then talking at a woman that doesn’t even seem to be listening to him.

Fury sends them to South America; it’s him, Natasha and Clint and they’re on radio silence for most of the mission. They identify it as a Hydra safe house, there’s a locked room, hidden behind finger print and retinal scanners that Stark manages to help them gain access to remotely.

The room they find behind the finger print and retinal scanners looks like a low tech hospital room, obviously not been used in a while but it’s the chair in the center of the room that draws their attention.

The Red Room archives that they’ve decrypted had a two page document, that had schematics for chairs that looked like this.

Chairs like this that they’d strapped Stevie into and…

“Cap,” Clint says, he doesn’t touch him, just says his name, he takes a deep breath and releases it. Stevie’s safe now, she’s locked up in a tiny room, but she’s as far out of Hydra’s reach as he can get her at the moment.

“I’m fine,” he says, he turns his back on the chair and sees Natasha at the computers, she’s already got the flash drive in and started pulling stuff off the server. The computer people back at SHIELD will pull out any important information when they get back.

For now he and Clint keep their back to the chair, watch Natasha at the computers and he tries to not think about plans that he’s making for the day when Stevie knows him and he can bring her home.

 

******************************************************************************

 

The table is shaped like the SHIELD emblem which always sort of struck Bucky as amusing. Fury is standing at the front of the table and behind him is a screen that is flashing a series of images one after the other.

It’s like any other briefing that he’s sat through and he’s doodling 3D boxes on his tablet, Stevie was the artist; give her some pencils and a pad of sketch paper and the things she could draw…

It always sort of took his breath away, the life she could manage to put into the simplest of sketches.

Now she’s sitting in a room smaller than the bathroom in their first apartment and he knows that her good behavior means that she’s getting dressed in sweat pants and a tank top instead of the one piece thing that they’d kept her so she couldn’t take it off and use it to kill someone else or herself.

“Anyone have any questions?” Fury asks just as loud alarm klaxons start going off.

“Are we under attack?” Stark asks and Fury ignores him, pressing a finger to his comm instead.

“What’s going on?” he barks and whatever he hears in his ear has his eye darting to Bucky and Bucky drops the tablet because the only reason he has to be looking at him like that is if this is something to do with Stevie.

 

******************************************************************************

 

They don’t know what’s going on, not really. Stevie had been in with a therapist is all Hill could tell them and she’d apparently lost her mind somewhere about the 43 minute mark.

She’s on level 3 somewhere and Bucky has Clint attached to him like a barnacle that he can’t scrape off. He doesn’t know where the others have gone off to. He’s just trying to reach her first because no one has her best interests in mind, no one is going to look at the end of a gun she’s got her fingers wrapped around and do anything but pull the trigger.

They find her on level 2, which means the cameras and sensors in the building are all screwed to hell and back.

“Stevie,” Bucky says, trying to draw her attention to himself instead of the SHIELD agents scurrying to get out of her way. When her eyes make contact with his there’s nothing but terror in them, whatever the therapist they’ve got her talking with has unleashed in her head must be pretty bad.

She’s got a gun in her hand and he can feel Clint’s hands on his shoulders trying to pull him back out of the line of fire. A gunshot won’t kill him but it certainly won’t feel pleasant either.

She screams at him and he can feel Clint startle behind him.

He holds his hands up and tries to make himself appear as unthreatening as possible.

“I don’t speak whatever it is you’re screaming at me there sweetheart,” he says, he keeps his voice light and calm.

“You are not real,” she spits at him, she waves her gun at him and he takes a step closer to her, when she doesn’t shoot him in the face he takes another. “This is a trick, always a trick.”

The look on her face is breaking his heart and he wonders how many time Hydra and all those other nameless, faceless entities had used his face to break her.

He wonders why Fury and the others haven’t told him that she’s remembering things, that there was a real possibility that if he went into her room that she would say his name and know who he was.

“Not a trick,” he says, he takes another step closer and she backs up one. “Are we dancing now sweetheart?”

“You’ve never taken me dancing,” she says, her eyes look wet, like she’d been crying and he takes another step forward. Over her shoulder he can see Natasha at the end of the hallway, gun up and he makes the slightest of motions to hold her off.

He’s got this, she hasn’t shot him yet, hasn’t touched or harmed another person since he gained her attention.

He’s got this.

“You would never say yes,” he reminds her quietly. “I always asked and you always said no, tried to push me at the nearest gal and…” he’s standing right in front of her, if he reached a hand out he could touch her skin, he can feel the press of the gun barrel against _his_ skin though, so he doesn’t

“If I asked you to dance now would you say no?” he asks and she makes a noise that sounds like a sob, he hears the clatter of the gun hitting the ground and the only reason that Stevie doesn’t follow is because he’s got his arms wrapped around her and she’s clinging to him like she doesn’t mean to let go.

 

 

******************************************************************************

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Winter Soldier 3/?**

 

 

She won’t let him go, but to be fair Bucky hasn’t actually tried to let her go himself. She holds him and it takes him a bit to figure out that she’s crying.

Quiet sobs against his shoulder, she barely moves, doesn’t make a sound. He wouldn’t even be able to tell but she’s been crying long enough that it’s making his shoulder damp where she’s hiding her face.

He swings her up in his arms; she wraps her arms around his neck and continues to hide her face.

She’s so unbearably tiny, just like she’d been growing up. Just skin and bones and pale blond hair. There’s muscle there now from whatever they’d done to her.

A hand reaches out to touch her arm and he jerks away, tightening his grip on her.

“Captain Barnes,” Fury’s voice is gentle but laced with that thread of steel that his ma used to get, ‘Bucky Barnes you’ll listen to me right now, young man’.

He glares at the man, he could have just told him that Stevie was remembering stuff, it would have saved them lots of time and Stevie fighting her way through a couple of levels of men that she had no reason to believe didn’t want to hurt her.

“I’m not leaving her,” he says, they’ll have to take him down and pry her out of his arms; he guarantees he’ll fight them every single step of the way.

He should never have left her, should have told Erskine to shove his serum and stayed with her to the end. It probably wouldn’t have been long, Stevie was a fighter, there was no doubt about that, but it had been a hard winter and it’d taken her months to recover from the pneumonia.

She would have been at peace then, up there in heaven with her ma and dad. She wouldn’t have been frozen in some metal tube locked up and stolen away for doctors with delusions to make her into a weapon against her will, all because Bucky couldn’t bear to let her go.

“No one’s asking you to, son,” Fury says, Natasha is standing at his shoulder but she looks him directly in the eye and nods. If Fury steps wrong, Natasha will help him.

 

******************************************************************************

 

Stevie’s in a different room then the one that she’d been in before.

“There’s no mirrors,” Natasha says when they get there. Bucky’s sitting on the bed and Stevie’s curled up in a ball, head resting against his leg. “There’s no one watching, can’t promise there’s no listening devices though.”

“It’s not like there’s anything secret about me or Stevie,” he says, he runs a hand over Stevie’s head, smoothing her hair down. Her forehead is warm and clammy, like she’s running a low grade fever, he tries to not be alarmed because all Stevie’s sicknesses started with a little fever and then turned into her having to stand over boiling pots trying to force air into her lungs and cold compresses trying to bring her temperature down.

But she’s got a form of the serum if all the documents they’ve found can be trusted, so no sickness should be able to take a foothold.

There’s all those others drugs they were using on her though, they’d found traces in her blood and they’d listed off all the long names and awful side effects so matter-of-factly that he’d wanted to punch something.

God only knows what kind of damage they’ve caused that the serum might not have been able to counteract immediately; he can’t even imagine what kind of hell she’s lived through.

 

******************************************************************************

 

She doesn’t say anything, she barely even moves except when Bucky has to get up to stretch his legs so they don’t keep falling asleep and use the little bathroom off to the side of the room, forcing her to do so as well.

“Come on,” he murmurs softly and tugs her to her feet. He cups her face in his hands and her eyes are dazed and groggy, he’d think she was medicated to the gills but the only thing she’s been touching is the bottled water and Bucky’s been drinking that as well.

He leans her against the wall outside the bathroom, and closes the door just enough for the allusion of privacy to do what needs to be done.

When he comes out she’s sitting against the wall instead of leaning, knees drawn up to her chest. He squats down in front of her and touches her arm gently.

“Come on, up you go, sweetheart,” he says and he gives her his hand and lets her use it to pull herself to her feet. When he turns her into the bathroom she stops suddenly and he lets his hand fall away from the small of her back.

He scratches at his head, “I can wait outside if you think you can manage on your own.”

She shoots him a look that is such pure Stevie Rogers at her most indignant that he smirks a bit and has to put his hands behind his back so he doesn’t try and hug her.

“You can’t blame me there darling, you look like a strong breeze will take you right away with it,” he says, using his best cajoling tone.

Stevie just narrows her eyes at him and pushes at his chest until he takes a step back, then closes the door in his face.

He grins at the door like a crazy person, because he can. There’s no lock on the door so she can’t barricade herself in there, there’s nothing for her to hurt herself with. So he stands there and waits for his Stevie to open the door, because that was who walked in there.

 

******************************************************************************

 

He doesn’t time her, doesn’t actually have any way of knowing how long she’s been in there because he doesn’t have a watch strapped to his wrist and Natasha took his phone with him when she left the room.

He taps on the door so she has some warning and when there’s no noise he pushes it open tentatively. He can hear water running in the little sink and it looks like Stevie had been washing her face and got distracted by the mirror.

Her face is the same structure wise, but she looks healthy, not at all like she’s got half of foot into the grave next to her ma and dad.

He stands behind her though he doesn’t touch her and her eyes leave her own face in the mirror to study his. He feels like one of those drawings that she used to spend hours studying in the museums, then would spend hours at home trying to recreate.

“What’s got you looking all confused?” he asks.

She licks her lips, dragging the lower one between her teeth to bite at it. He waits her out, he was always more patient then she was, she was more a barrel full speed ahead, take no prisoners type gal. She and Natasha will probably end up the best of friends, and she must never be allowed to interact with Clint or she’ll think throwing herself off of a rooftops is an acceptable activity.

And it’s not, not even for Clint who Bucky is fond of yes, but wouldn’t follow to the ends of the earth if need be.

“Sweetheart,” she whispers, her voice sounds scratchy and disused, he tries to not wonder how long it’s been since she actually used it to communicate in something other than screams. “Darling.”

“I would have put a ring on your finger, but you wouldn’t even go out dancing with me.”

He’s had a long, _long_ time to come to grips with how he felt about Stevie. He loves her more then he’s loved anyone else in his life, ever. He still has his ma’s ring and he knows, would be willing to bet anything and everything he is and will be, that she’ll wear that ring on her finger and he’ll swear his troth to her and she to him.

“I’m tired,” her fingers wrap around the sink, her eyes close but not before tears escape.

He croons nonsensical noises at her and she draws a deep, shaky breath and turns. She wraps her arms around Bucky’s chest and he puts one hand on the back of her head and uses the other to hold her to him. He leans down and presses a kiss to the top of her head.

“We’ll go lay back down and I’ll call you sweetheart and darling and honeybunch and my girl and tell you about the new music I’m going to take you dancing to when you’re feeling better.”

“Don’t think I’ll ever feel better,” she mumbles against his chest, he rests his cheek against the top of her head and closes his eyes this time.

“See and you’re often times wrong, so you listen to me Stephanie Rogers, and you listen good. You are going to be fine, we’re going to talk to people and we’re going to get help you get better and when you are we’re going to walk out of here together. We’ll have a burger and share a shake and go dancing to music that doesn’t actually make any sense any more. I’ll take you home and buy you all the art supplies your heart desires and I’ll take you to museums so you can complain about the presentation and I’ll introduce you to my friends, half of which you’re sure to love and the other half that you’re not to spend any time alone with.”

“Promise?”

“I swear.”

 

 

******************************************************************************

 


End file.
